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Gardiner Expressway: 'Big Daddy's' gift to Toronto

The Gardiner Expressway being built in the 1950s. It is reaching York St. The postal building, which is now the Air Canada Centre, can be seen in the foreground. (Roworth, Eddy / Toronto Star Archives)

It will be 58 years this summer that one of Toronto’s most enduring (albeit, heavily patched) and controversial landmarks — the Gardiner Expressway — opened for business, shuttling motorists along what is now an 18-kilometre lakeside corridor of concrete.

Aug. 8, 1958 was the official ribbon-cutting day, with the ceremonial shears wielded by Ontario Premier Leslie Frost and Fred. G. Gardiner, the appointed chair of Metro Toronto Council (the latter existed pre-1998 amalgamation to govern issues such as water, sewers and transport that overlapped the city and the suburbs).

It took a determined man like Gardiner — called a “municipal Churchill” and “towering giant” by admirers, after his death in 1983, and “Big Daddy” in his lifetime — to turn the idea of an arterial “super highway” along the waterfront into a reality. And at a cost close to $104 million, it was completed on schedule and remarkably — by today’s standards — just a little over budget.

Fred G. Gardiner looks on as Premier Frost holds up the scissors with which he cut the ribbon to officially open the Fred Gardiner Expressway on Aug. 8, 1958.

There had been talk in the late 1940s at the municipal level about how car-loving Torontonians needed an expressway to relieve the Lake Shore Blvd. route. A 1947 Toronto Star story described a city works committee proposal for a “$9 million’’ super highway. It would enable motorists “to skip the Sunnyside area and the heavily jammed Lake Shore boulevard.” At that time, Sunnyside Amusement Park hugged the lakeshore at the foot of Roncesvalles Ave.

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In a heated discussion at city hall in November 1947, about the super highway then-Mayor Robert Saunders told aldermen, “We have to get ahead with the lake front highway” and telling one councillor, “I’m amazed you want this highway held up.”

But it all fizzled because, as the Star reported, Dec. 20, 1947, there was a still a postwar shortage of steel.

Welcome to the Frederick G. Gardiner Expressway. (Darrell, Dick)

However, by 1952 the lakeside highway idea had roared back, now with an estimated cost of about $30 million. Allan Lamport had become mayor and his suggestion that it could be built as a toll road didn’t pass muster with the province’s deputy minister of highways, J.D. Millar, who told a Star reporter it would only mean “cars backed up for miles” waiting to pay “a 3-cent toll” at the entrance.

Premier Frost had appointed Gardiner — a successful Bay St. lawyer known for a no-nonsense, steely approach to getting things done — to the Metro Toronto chair in 1953 and Gardiner turned his focus on the proposal of a lakeshore expressway. (In his eight years as chairman, Gardiner — who was proud of working 7 days a week and once quipped that the “only hobby I ever had was work’’ — also oversaw the amalgamation of Toronto and the suburban police forces into the Metro police force, the development of water treatment plants, an amalgamated parks system and more.

Gardiner soon acquired his “Big Daddy’’ moniker — a name that stuck throughout his political life and even headlined his obituary. It was bestowed by alderman Phil Givens (later mayor) after the bullying, pugnacious patriarch in Tennessee Williams’ 1950s’ hit play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Givens would sometimes butt heads with Gardiner and told the Star in 1983 that if Gardiner “cut you up, he did it thoroughly. He eviscerated you. He left your entrails all over the floor.” But he also allowed that Gardiner was a “tower of strength” who knew where he was going.

The Gardiner Expressway sweeps into the curve that leads to the Don Valley Parkway in 1967. (Toronto Star Archives)

And with the expressway, that meant getting an engineering firm to plan a four-to-six lane roadway from the Humber River in the west to Woodbine Ave., in the east. A plan was delivered to Gardiner in April 1954. But there were some hitches.

The City of Toronto and the Toronto Harbour Commission didn’t like the proposed shoreline route that took the expressway through the Exhibition grounds. The route was then moved to north of Lake Shore Blvd. and north of the CNE grounds. It was decided to build a new Humber bridge to connect with the QEW and an extension to Queen St. The route also meant the destruction of South Parkdale homes and Sunnyside Amusement Park (constructed in 1922), at the foot of Roncesvalles. (Today, only the Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion, Sunnyside Pool and the Palais Royale building survive.) The CNE lost about 10 acres of land, a couple of buildings and the original Dufferin Gates.

The city also wasn’t happy the route was proposed to go over Fort York with an on ramp from Bathurst St. and it refused to transfer ownership of the land to Metro. Historical societies (or “hysterical societies” as Gardiner called them, supported the city. It was one of the few times Gardiner backed down — he agreed to change the route.

The construction of the expressway, at first dubbed the Lakeshore Expressway, began in 1955 and continued, with work done in segments, to 1966. By 1958 its name had changed to the Gardiner Expressway. Big Daddy was OK with that. He told a Star reporter in 1961, the year before he gave up being Metro chair: “Before that somebody had wanted to name an old man’s home after me. Somebody else had wanted to name a sewage plant after me. I didn’t exactly like those ideas and when the third one came along, I accepted the honour.”

The Gardiner Expressway between Jarvis and Carlaw during Victoria Day fireworks in 2015. (Marcus Oleniuk/Toronto Star)

Since the Gardiner was constructed it has not been expanded. But there have been changes. Guardrails were installed along its full length in 1966. Two bridges over the Humber, built in the 1950s, were rebuilt in the late 1990s. Part of the QEW was downloaded from the province in 1997 and officially became part of the Gardiner.

Rather than pay a fortune to make badly needed repairs from the Don Valley to Leslie St., the city decided to demolish that stretch in 2001. Over the years there have been many suggestions to destroy the entire, or part, of the Gardiner and also to build an underground roadway.

It became evident, especially in the 1990s, that decades of road salt had caused extensive corrosion. Pieces of concrete were falling off.

The Gardiner Expressway looking East from the CNE into the city core in December 2012. (DAVID COOPER/TORONTO STAR)

In 2013, the city allocated $500 million for repair and rehab work on the Gardiner, to be carried out from 2013 to 2022.

In June 2015, Toronto city council approved a “hybrid plan” for the eastern section that will keep the Gardiner-DVP link, demolish on and off ramps that extend to Logan Ave. and build new ramps between the Don River and Cherry St.

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